Reading Time: < 1 minute A few years ago I tweeted a flowchart called “Should I say resources” and followed it up with a blog post and a file to print stickers. I find the term resources to be too ambiguous to be useful when talking about things and dehumanising when it’s used to describe people. After hearing it a …
Building a progression framework for a multidisciplinary organisation
Reading Time: 6 minutes I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit different; this post describes the approach I used to help …
A short retrospective format to close a piece of work
Reading Time: 3 minutes This week I ran a short retrospective to close a two-year-long project; I had limited time and ten willing participants. This post covers the approach I used to create space for reflection. The constraints were: we only had one hour, which in practice means 50mins at the most, so no time for a big timeline …
Networks, Serendipity and the flow of ideas
Reading Time: 7 minutes I gave a talk at SEACON recently building on top of my previous blog post about assisted serendipity. I wanted to share the ideas in that talk here as it is very relevant to the current times. This long post covers why serendipity is essential and how we can create opportunities for it to happen, …
Daily Outside Photo: Adding a bit of humanness to your Slack group
Reading Time: 3 minutes A quick post to share something that makes me smile. A slack* channel, yes another one, but it is one worth having. Many of us are working from home, one of the challenges that come with this is leaving the house. It’s important to get outside to take a break, get some air and move …
My good looking video conferencing set up
Reading Time: 2 minutes On most of my recent calls, someone has asked me about my home video set up because it looks good. I’m writing this quick post so when it next happens, I can point them here. I have been working from home on and off for the last few years, but only when the pandemic stopped …
Quick icebreakers for online meetings, (that don’t suck)
Reading Time: 4 minutes Icebreakers seem to have lots of people squirming in their seats, me included. There is a lot of benefit to running them well and downsides when they are not. This post covers why do them and shares some that have gone well for me in the past. I have been running an online lean coffee …
Social group sizes, Dunbar’s number and implications for communities of practice
Reading Time: 4 minutes Communities of practice have a significant impact on organisations for all the reasons which I have spoken about in my book and many times on stage. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to explore the correlation of communities of practice and natural human communities with evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. This lead to a …
Assisted Serendipity, Random Coffee and the power of the unstructured meeting
Reading Time: 3 minutes We have some of the best conversations when they are unstructured and happen by chance. That moment when you bump into someone when you are out and about, and they happen to mention something that really helps you. Or you sit down to lunch with a work colleague, and it sparks a great new idea. …
Consequence Scanning – an agile event for responsible teams
Reading Time: 2 minutes This post is about something important, which is why it’s taken some time to put together. Earlier this year I was fortunate to work with Doteveryone. We created a new agile event that frames team conversation about the potential wider consequences of what they are building. Doteveryone describes themselves as a responsible technology think tank. …
Introducing Capability Profile Mapping
Reading Time: 5 minutes A little while back I wrote a post on skills and capability mapping with communities of practice, I have been developing this work further into an organisational-wide approach, under the name of Capability Profile Mapping. Capability Profile Mapping is a powerful approach for organisations, individuals and teams to create a shared understanding of their current …
Agile in the Ether’s first remote conference
Reading Time: 6 minutes I run a remote meet-up called Agile in the Ether. A while back I asked twitter followers if I should extend it out to a conference and they said yes, so I did and it was great. This is what happened and what I learnt. Remote meeting is a hot topic, remote meet-ups and conferences …
Facilitation feedback tool
Reading Time: < 1 minute Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement Helen Timperley and John Hattie Many of us facilitate workshops or agile habits regularly and we know if a workshop has gone well if the outcomes are useful. There are also lots of elements of facilitation that we don’t often get feedback on. …
Posters to show how awesome communities of practice are
Reading Time: < 1 minute If you regularly read my blog, then you will know that communities of practice are my specialist subject and core to a lot of the work that I do. I help lots of organisations who are building their specialist skills in digital and agile delivery and those communities form an essential foundation for just that. …
The team manual, an exercise to help build empathy in teams
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a recent talk that I gave at Agile testing days and Lean Agile Scotland called “Whole Team Responsibility”, I mentioned the team manual as a way of growing empathy in teams. Here is a quick write up with a little more detail and how to use it.
Agile in the Ether, a remote meetup
Reading Time: 2 minutes I have a habit of bringing people and communities together, this means I can’t seem to help myself setting up or getting involved in running meetups (my current count is at six*). Faced with not enough time to devote to my existing meetup, I naturally decided to start a new one. This time a remote …
Why I’m going to stop saying agile ceremonies
Reading Time: 2 minutes Many people use the term “Agile ceremonies” as a collective term for activities like standups, retrospectives, reviews and planning. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the word “ceremony” in this context. It’s never sat well with me and I don’t like using it with people who are new to agile ways of working. I’ve been thinking …
A decent remote show and tell set up
Reading Time: 4 minutes Many organisations work with dispersed teams or stakeholders, so there must be an easy way to do an engaging remote show and tell, surely… right? I couldn’t find one, this post is the result of my research to find my own and a guide for others.
How community, social networks and building habits helped me get fitter and healthier
Reading Time: 5 minutes That might sound like a bit of an odd title on my blog but bear with me. I have spent the last year making some changes in myself and I’ve used everything I know about how people work, approaches to change and experimentation in order to do that. This post talks about how I went …
Mapping skills and capabilities with communities of practice
Reading Time: 3 minutes I first wrote about skills mapping in my book Building successful communities of practice. This post digs a little deeper into identifying skills and capabilities with communities of practice. Skills and capability maps help organisations identify gaps and where to invest in skills development. So it makes sense that many want to create them. At a …
Should you call people resources?
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’m a big believer that language and the words you use say a lot about a culture, and that we can take steps to change culture through changing those words. Words can make people feel excluded, unappreciated and overlooked. I try to make conscious decisions about the words that I use and will phase out …
The team collaboration party game
Reading Time: 3 minutes I recently put a workshop together to take a new team through to help describe some important agile concepts including the benefits of working collaboratively and swarming on tasks; the value of communication; how to self-organise; how limiting work in progress achieves more value and what we mean by T-shaped teams. The workshop itself was a …
The 4 Ps of effective standups
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is a quick blog post with some tips for effective stand-ups that a friend asked me to write so he could share it with someone else. So here it is Mark. These 4Ps came to life when I was working with Amy Wagner creating and delivering some training in Brussels. The training was intended to …
Conference speaker needs
Reading Time: < 1 minute About a month ago I put together a list of needs for conference speakers. I’d been thinking about it because I’ve been speaking at a fair few conferences recently and seen various approaches by different organisers. I’ve also seen important information missed that I and other speakers could have benefitted from up front. I know how …
Understanding needs for building digital / agile capability
Reading Time: 2 minutes I do a fair bit of training with organisations who want to become more agile. The conversation often starts with “can you give agile training to our staff?”. This is a starting point for a conversation but needs a bit more digging before I can understand what the real need is and what outcome we should …